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拍品專文
Painted in 1917, Lyonel Feininger’s Hinter der Kirche II (Behind the Church II) is a spectacular work depicting a group of figures almost floating across a square behind the main church in Weimar. This period was one of great uncertainty and instability for Feininger who, as a struggling American artist then living in a Germany now at war with the USA, found himself facing increasingly constrained circumstances. Often separated from his wife, Julia, and family, he was allowed to visit only certain districts of Berlin, and was obliged to report daily to the authorities. As a result, his studio became more of a refuge than ever, resulting in some of the artist’s finest pictorial achievements to date. At the same time, this was an important moment of professional success for the artist—a major exhibition of Feininger’s recent works opened at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm Gallery in the autumn of 1917, prompting the artist’s first significant breakthrough onto the international stage. Within eighteen months of this show, Feininger was among the first artists invited by Walter Gropius to teach at his revolutionary art school, The Bauhaus.
In many ways, Hinter der Kirche II reflects this contrasting mixture of uncertainty, instability and high achievement. The painting is a second version of an important and highly accomplished picture depicting the town square adjoining the City Church in Weimar that Feininger had made only the previous year: Hinter der Stadtkirche of 1916 (Hess, no. 155; Leicester Museum and Art Gallery). Feininger had become familiar with Weimar’s monuments from pre-war visits to the city, and his memories, transformed by distance and time, fuelled a series of visionary paintings on the city's architecture. In his first depiction of the church, Feininger constructed an elegant and harmonious pictorial fugue of light, space and architectonic form, punctuated by slender, vertical figures all dressed in period costume. An idealised vision of an idealised town, the painting was an embodiment of what the poet Theodor Däubler described as Feininger’s ‘crystalline Cubism.’ It also typified the aims that Feininger himself had outlined, in a letter to Alfred Kubin, of expressing ‘the eternal calm of objects and even the air surrounding them’ of a ‘world, which is furthest removed from the real world!’ (letter to A. Kubin, 15 January 1915; quoted in H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1959, p. 76).
By direct contrast, there is a heightened sense of Expressionism and tension within Hinter der Kirche II. Indeed, the similarity between the angular and seemingly motional architecture of many of the artist’s best-known pictures and the famous stage-sets for the legendary 1920 film Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari is such that, even though he had nothing to do with the movie, Feininger was, in later life, often asked by admirers if he had been the film’s designer. Writing to his wife Julia in August 1917, around the time he was working on the present painting, Feininger observed: ‘I realize how much less sentimental I have become in my work… before I was more or less dependent on story-telling. My conception is [now] clearer and more my own. There is more invention and abstraction now in my work besides the deeper feeling and psychic need to paint. Three years ago I was still concerned with picturesque qualities which now I have succeeded in overcoming’ (letter to J. Feininger, 14 August 1917; quoted in J.L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, London, 1975, p. 89). With its elongated and exaggerated forms, angular shadows and strongly contrasting diagonals Hinter der Kirche II exudes a pervasive sense of drama and motion.
For Hans Hess, the overt Expressionism and drama of Hinter der Kirche II is such that the painting, ‘can be compared to a ballet scene. Here the figures perform a dance, and the architecture takes part as well. It is a scene in which the instability of men is set in a world of instability and all relations to the real world are placed in doubt. Though fantastic and comic, it is nevertheless the expression of a tragic moment... The instability of the world in its physical and social sense became clear to the artists, and each one expressed it in his own way; Feininger’s way is ironical, according to his nature. It is a new act in the comédie humane – a masquerade of lost souls, stepping through the mirror cabinet of the tricks and illusions of a world that no longer provides any stability to men. Everything is in doubt: the place, the space, the road. If the figures were only ghosts, it would be undisturbing; if the whole were a fairy tale, it would be comical – but it is 1917, and the time for laughter has long gone from the world. This painting can be understood as a reflection of the artist’s own position of instability – he is an alien without animosity in a breaking world, belonging and not belonging at the same time – and as a forecast to a future state of being which became almost normal for the floating inhabitants of Europe during and after the wars – the suspension of reality’ (op. cit., 1959, p. 76).
In many ways, Hinter der Kirche II reflects this contrasting mixture of uncertainty, instability and high achievement. The painting is a second version of an important and highly accomplished picture depicting the town square adjoining the City Church in Weimar that Feininger had made only the previous year: Hinter der Stadtkirche of 1916 (Hess, no. 155; Leicester Museum and Art Gallery). Feininger had become familiar with Weimar’s monuments from pre-war visits to the city, and his memories, transformed by distance and time, fuelled a series of visionary paintings on the city's architecture. In his first depiction of the church, Feininger constructed an elegant and harmonious pictorial fugue of light, space and architectonic form, punctuated by slender, vertical figures all dressed in period costume. An idealised vision of an idealised town, the painting was an embodiment of what the poet Theodor Däubler described as Feininger’s ‘crystalline Cubism.’ It also typified the aims that Feininger himself had outlined, in a letter to Alfred Kubin, of expressing ‘the eternal calm of objects and even the air surrounding them’ of a ‘world, which is furthest removed from the real world!’ (letter to A. Kubin, 15 January 1915; quoted in H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1959, p. 76).
By direct contrast, there is a heightened sense of Expressionism and tension within Hinter der Kirche II. Indeed, the similarity between the angular and seemingly motional architecture of many of the artist’s best-known pictures and the famous stage-sets for the legendary 1920 film Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari is such that, even though he had nothing to do with the movie, Feininger was, in later life, often asked by admirers if he had been the film’s designer. Writing to his wife Julia in August 1917, around the time he was working on the present painting, Feininger observed: ‘I realize how much less sentimental I have become in my work… before I was more or less dependent on story-telling. My conception is [now] clearer and more my own. There is more invention and abstraction now in my work besides the deeper feeling and psychic need to paint. Three years ago I was still concerned with picturesque qualities which now I have succeeded in overcoming’ (letter to J. Feininger, 14 August 1917; quoted in J.L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, London, 1975, p. 89). With its elongated and exaggerated forms, angular shadows and strongly contrasting diagonals Hinter der Kirche II exudes a pervasive sense of drama and motion.
For Hans Hess, the overt Expressionism and drama of Hinter der Kirche II is such that the painting, ‘can be compared to a ballet scene. Here the figures perform a dance, and the architecture takes part as well. It is a scene in which the instability of men is set in a world of instability and all relations to the real world are placed in doubt. Though fantastic and comic, it is nevertheless the expression of a tragic moment... The instability of the world in its physical and social sense became clear to the artists, and each one expressed it in his own way; Feininger’s way is ironical, according to his nature. It is a new act in the comédie humane – a masquerade of lost souls, stepping through the mirror cabinet of the tricks and illusions of a world that no longer provides any stability to men. Everything is in doubt: the place, the space, the road. If the figures were only ghosts, it would be undisturbing; if the whole were a fairy tale, it would be comical – but it is 1917, and the time for laughter has long gone from the world. This painting can be understood as a reflection of the artist’s own position of instability – he is an alien without animosity in a breaking world, belonging and not belonging at the same time – and as a forecast to a future state of being which became almost normal for the floating inhabitants of Europe during and after the wars – the suspension of reality’ (op. cit., 1959, p. 76).